I was rather surprised when they announced that the remake would be delayed because of the war in Ukraine but now that I've played the original for the first time I understand why they did so.

The fact they got away with making an actual war game so light-hearted and cheerful, where it's seen as a game even by the characters in-game really weirds me the fuck out. It's not like Fire Emblem where you control like one (1) singular knight and you fight a another singular soldier and they do a cool stylish strike, no, here you control whole regiments and troops firing at each other.

Beside that weird contrast, this game is rules. It's extremely engaging, you have a wide array of units to choose and control, the characters all have their pros and cons and are fun to experiment with, there's so many maps to choose from, the music slaps (that bass line literally does) and the pixel art looks topnotch. I also thought it was really balanced.

Though it can get a bit easy at time, with the AI sometime doing really dumb stuff, I still got a lot of fun.

Though I had a good time with it in retrospective, I feel Live A Live (2022) is an extremely conflicting game... literally.

When I played it, I felt like playing 2 separate games at the same time:

1) One being a somewhat closed and linear JRPG on the SNES whose fun comes from exploring and figuring out its mechanics and its world;
2) And another being an open JRPG released in the late 2010s/early 2020s which doesn't really care about immersing the player and is oh so scared of having them having to figure out anything: every item and interactible element is indicated visually, text boxes explaining you any form of new mechanics appear before you even have the chance to experience it, and there is even a mini map indicating where to go... at all time.

In other words, every quality of life "improvement" added in this remake of Live A Live feels completely disconnected from what you're actually playing, as well as being detrimental to the experience I think. And this is coming from someone who never played the original release.

I know for a fact that because the chapters are so self-contained and don't really offer much in term of world-building, battle system or other gameplay elements used by more traditional JRPGs to immerse the player in its world, the original release's enjoyment must have come from discovering the unique mechanics specific to each chapters, as well as their world.

Well this is completely thrown out in the remake. For example, there is no point in having to remember locations or memorize what might be of interest later, just follow the minimap. What eventually happens is that you end up only looking at the circle at the bottom-right corner of the screen, because that's the most logical and convenient thing to do if you want to progress. Adding to this, the world feels extremely empty now that items are highlighted. There is no more mystery or suspense like in other JRPGs where you're like "Will this closet have something inside?" as you just know it by entering the room a looking at it for less than 1 second.

I have so many other examples where the game just prevents you from interacting, engaging with it. All of this makes the game so much less interesting and memorable than it could have been. It's not a coincidence that my least favorite chapters were the first two ones I played... before I turned off the minimap and the advice boxes.

I feel like if they wanted to include all these QoL improvements, they should have completely remade that game, by making it bigger, more open, with more sidequests, longer stories and things like that, instead of making a faithful remake except with small dumb additions ruining it.

I still found enjoyment with though, especially after turning off the QoL things. I love the HD-2D artstyle (though I found the extremely slick, polished style not really suiting some parts of the game), the OST was great and didn't feel like simple arrangements of SNES tracks, I was surprised with how unique and varied the chapters were and the last part of the game was of course peak fiction.

But all of that didn't change the fact that I ended up really disappointed and even frustrated with this remake, which I thought would be the best way to experience Live A Live for the first time. I just wished I played the original instead.

Game's good.

But I prefered BotW overall. Apart from the weapon fusion mechanic which actually makes the low weapon durability make sense, I don't think any of the new additions improve the formula of the previous game whatsoever.

Combat is still extremely boring, the focus on skydiving makes the exploration way less interesting as you can just go to the nearest tower or sky island from your destination and fortnite jump to it, all sky islands look the same and most of them even offer the same "challenge", caves are extremely generic and uninteresting for the most part, there's more enemies sure but because they're all evenly distributed throughout the map it still feels extremely repetitive (I have no idea why they don't just make some monsters unique to their regions like they did for the desert), the new nuts and bolt mechanic is of course a miraculous technical achievement but I never felt like using it except when the game forced me to do so, shrines are still way to short and uninteresting (my god why was there so many "fight the robots naked" ones I hated those) and I thought the temples were way less challenging than the beasts in BotW (they all had sick designs though).

It's also extremely strange how they seemingly scrapped any mention of the previous game's plotpoint, like the ancient sheikah technology, the champions and the defeat of 100 years ago, and replaced it with more or less the same thing but different, now the ancient zonai technology, the sages and the defeat of 10,000 years ago. It's like they rebooted BotW even though it's a direct sequel, how bizarre.

I still had a lot of fun with it and I was even extremely surprised how "new" the map felt. It's like they made the perfect amount of change to it without straight up remaking a new map... though they kind of did with the depth which I thought was extremely cool to explore, as it also actually offers interesting reward for exploration in the form of nostalgic armor sets and weapons from the previous games in the series.

Overall, I think TotK is a good sequel to BotW but doesn't actually bring any meaningful change to it. Despite how much critically acclaimed BotW was, it still had flaws and I wish they focused on fixing those and polishing what they had instead of bringing new content to the table for the sake of having more content.

This is the first time I play a Phantasy Star game and I am pleasantly surprised with how good this was. For a game released in 1987, the same year as Dragon Quest II and Final Fantasy, this game does a lot of things right. There are 3 overworld maps to explore, each with their own style and musical theme, there is no weird impossible-to-guess-cryptic puzzles to solve in order to progress through the story (there's always an NPC somewhere giving you info on what to do), I thought it was really impressive graphically, with how detailed each monster was and how they all had an attack animation (!!!), and there was a ton of tracks for an 8-bit JRPG of the time, with multiple battle, dungeon, village and overworld themes.

Of course the added features of the Sega Ages (what a funny name) remaster drastically improved the experience I could have had if I played the original. I thought the game was a bit easy with the new pacing caused by the better rewards, but the absolute game changer was the dungeon map. My god, I could have NEVER played the original if it wasn't for that. The 1st person view coupled with the fact that every dungeons look the same make it an absolute necessity to draw the map yourself, and I don't really consider that fun. Maybe it was a bit much to spoil traps in advance though.

One thing the remaster couldn't fix though was the battle system. Spells are basically useless, making fights extremely limited and completely stakeless. Also I can't say I'm a big fan of the whole science fantasy setting, I felt like it went too much into the fantasy side of things.

If you've bought TotK on the e-shop, you should have enough gold coins to get this game for free like I did. If you like or if you want to get into old-school JRPGs, this is a really good entry for you, and if not, try it out! It's only a few bucks anyway.

PS. Also out of curiosity I tried opening the web manual included in this and it didn't work? is it just me? why must everything be online nowadays that's ridiculous?